Economic Predictions Using Web Usage Data

Makarand writes "The Chicago Tribune has an article on the claims of ComScore Networks Inc., that it can predict major economic trends by tracking the online activity of 1.5 Million people. The company gains access to people's Internet travelogues by giving them free security software and programs that speed up their connections. Economists say that the company's models need to be tested over several years before they can be considered accurate."

Comments

Spyware at its finest

[cperciva]

As a second gauge of spending, ComScore also looks for trends in the credit card statements that about 30,000 of its panelists view online.

That's right: If you have their spyware installed on your computer, they are going to be looking through your credit card statements.

Why isn't this illegal yet?

Very similar to Zipf's Law

[ekrout]

I recently learned about Zipf's Law, which uses a very simple formula to predict quantities of all sorts of things.

It's truly amazing. For example, it accurately predicts the populations of the 10 most populous cities, the number of appearances of the 10 most oft-used words on the entire Web, etc.

From a quick Google query: "Zipf's law, named after the Harvard linguistic professor George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950), is the observation that frequency of occurrence of some event ( P ), as a function of the rank ( i) when the rank is determined by the above frequency of occurrence, is a power-law function Pi ~ 1/ia with the exponent a close to unity."

Here is some more information: http://linkage.rockefeller.edu/wli/zipf/

Re:Spyware

[Todd Knarr]

Except that in ComScore's case, #2 is "Provide that something for free if people agree to be tracked by spyware.". If this is the ComScore I'm familiar with (and it looks like it is), they're up-front about what they're doing. You get their package knowing that you're becoming the equivalent of a Nielsen family with every single page you view being tracked and recorded. I personally wouldn't agree to that, but I imagine there's a lot of people who wouldn't care (or who have another computer for the browsing they don't want recorded).